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A Letter from Trotsky to Krupskaya, 17 May 1927

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A Letter from Trotsky to Krupskaya, 17 May 1927 DOCUMENTS 111 R. H. McNeal A LETTER FROM TROTSKY TO KRUPSKAYA, 17 MAY 1927 The relations between L. D. Trotsky and N. K. Krupskaya were never very friendly, although Trotsky, in his emigrant writings, tried to create the impression that they were close comrades.1 They first met in London in October, 1902 when Trotsky arrived shortly before dawn, direct from Siberian exile. Although they became acquainted, they were hardly close associates in the nine months between Trotsky's arrival and his split with Lenin at the Second Party Congress in July-August 1903. During the years of enmity between Lenin and Trotsky, 1903-1916, Krupskaya was anything but friendly with Trotsky, reserving some of her sharpest critical comments for him in her correspondence with comrades. After the October Revolution she naturally accepted her husband's political reconciliation with Trotsky, but had little contact with him, except for a brief time when the two households shared a dining room in the Kremlin. During Lenin's illness Krupskaya favored the ruling troika of Kamenev-Stalin-Zinoviev, partly because of her close personal association with Kamenev and Zinoviev in emigration. In early January, 1924, she specifically supported the ruling group and criticized Trotsky's "New Course" article. No doubt Trotsky con- sidered her an opponent, and a particularly inconvenient one, because of her close association with the image of Lenin. It seems, however, that Krupskaya was not completely committed in the factional struggle. No doubt her quarrels with Stalin played a major role in persuading her that the troika could not by itself replace Lenin, that Trotsky's continued role as a party leader was necessary. Very shortly after Lenin's death on January 21, 1924, Krupskaya wrote a personal note to Trotsky, telling him of Lenin's continued high esteem for him until the end of his life and implicitly offering a 1 A fuller narrative of their relationship than that which follows may be found in my book Bride of the Revolution: Krupskaya and Lenin (Ann Arbor, Michigan and London, 1972). This work provides source references concerning the partic- ulars that follow in this introductory note. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.226, on 30 Sep 2021 at 23:33:31, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000004223 112 DOCUMENTS personal reconciliation. Trotsky later took great pride in this letter, but at the time he seems to have given it not even the courtesy of a reply. Perhaps this was simply part of his physical or psychosomatic illness, which rendered him apathetic even to the need to rush from his resting spot in the Caucasus to Lenin's funeral. Perhaps he was not ready to forgive Krupskaya for her support of his enemies. Trotsky's silence at the special meeting on May 22,1924, the eve of the Thirteenth Party Congress, at which the question of distributing Lenin's testa- mentary letters to the Congress was discussed, and rejected, was another instance of Trotsky's unwillingness to offer Lenin's widow his encouragement. At the Congress itself she nevertheless came to his defence, and was fairly successful in silencing the troika's anti- Trotsky polemics. Trotsky still made no overture to Krupskaya, and her own opposi- tional stance became linked with Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1925. Only after the formation of a united opposition, in mid-1926, linking Kamenev-Zinoviev with Trotsky, did Krupskaya find herself in the same camp with Trotsky, and even then it seems that she had very little direct contact with him. Her most dramatic contribution to the united opposition was the smuggling of Lenin's testament to Max Eastman in the fall of 1926, and this she undertook on her own, not long before the temporary capitulation of the opposition leaders to the Central Committee in October, 1926. This retreat, which con- trasted sharply with Krupskaya's act of defiance, seems to have ended once and for all her willingness to work with the leaders of the united opposition, Trotsky included. On November 3, 1926, Stalin told the Fifteenth Party Conference that Krupskaya had left the opposition. This did not mean that she had already become a supporter of the Central Committee (Stalin). In public she was silent on the entire matter, and the following document suggests that her position was sufficiently neutral that the united opposition, making its final effort in 1927, believed that she could be won back. It appears that Zinoviev, her closest friend in the opposition, wrote to her first, attempting to persuade her to rejoin the opposition.1 The date was probably between the middle of April and the middle of May, the period in which the united opposition resumed vigorous activity in response to the Shanghai massacre of Communists by Kuomintang forces. The internal evidence of the following document also indicates that Krupskaya's reply was less an argument against the opposition than a brief dismissal of their position on the ground that the issues they had chosen were not vitally important - "a fuss". This fits in with her past record of opposition, 1 See second paragraph of the following document. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.226, on 30 Sep 2021 at 23:33:31, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000004223 DOCUMENTS 113 which had emphasized domestic issues rather than foreign policy. Having been shown Krupskaya's letter to Zinoviev, Trotsky now attempted to bring his eloquence to bear. The letter which follows is preserved in the original typescript (with handwritten corrections) by Trotsky in the Trotsky Archive of the Harvard University Library.1 While Trotsky presumably thought that there was some chance to persuade Lenin's widow to lend her prestige to the opposition once again, it also seems that he regarded this as a useful tract for circu- lation in the opposition underground, which at that time was still able to reproduce and disseminate modest quantities of propaganda. This is suggested by another document in the Trotsky archive, a retyped copy of the letter to Krupskaya, bearing the title K voprosu "samokritiki" (Concerning the Question of "Self-Criticism").2 This version omits the salutation and closing expression of personal good wishes, but is otherwise the same. The copy sent to Krupskaya evidently did not contain any explicit indication that it might be disseminated to a wider audience, although the titled copy surely seems to have been intended for such a purpose. "Open letters" to this or that person have their function, but it is rarely to win agreement from their ostensible addressee. Usually that person is being implicitly accused of something, and the arguments are aimed more at a wider public than the addressee. Trotsky does not seem to have been very sensitive to this problem. His handwritten, closing personal note strongly suggests that he thought that Krupskaya might in fact read the letter sympathetically, but most of it is couched in accusatory tones. With incredible insensitivity to her pride as the first Leninist and incredible blindness to his own erratic record as a Leninist (as it must have appeared to Krupskaya, and anyone who was not a Trotsky disciple), he berates her for her alleged mistakes and seems to expect a simple capitulation in accepting the opposition line. This technique was doomed to futility. It appears that Krupskaya did receive the letter, for an implicit answer appeared in Pravda as a letter to the editor on May 20, 1927 - three days after the dating of the Trotsky letter. No personal reply exists in the Trotsky archive, possibly because Krupskaya felt that this was irrelevant once open letters had become the medium of exchange. Her letter to the editor was not dated, a somewhat puzzling detail. She did not specifically defend the Central Committee line, but stressed the need for restraint in "self- criticism". The opposition, she said, had gone too far, "quantity was 1 The present writer is greatly indebted to the Harvard University Library and the late Merle Fainsod for permission to publish the text of this letter. It bears the Trotsky Archive number T950. 2 Harvard University, Trotsky Archive number T951. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.226, on 30 Sep 2021 at 23:33:31, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000004223 114 DOCUMENTS transformed into quality, comradely criticism became factionalism", the workers would feel that the "basic principles of the party and Soviet power" were in question. As a self-styled "Bolshevik-Leninist", Trotsky did not wish to acknowledge that Lenin's widow had rebuffed him on this occasion, and his letter was never published by him or his followers. It is time that it is made available, as a concise summation of Trotsky's ideo- logical position at this critical juncture and a record of Trotsky's inability to understand Nadezhda Krupskaya. A. TpofijKHft] IlHCbMO KpyncKoft 17.V.27. 4oporan H.K.i BaM Ha MauiHHice, *JTO6M He 3axpy4HHTb pa36opoM noiepica, p c ro4aMH He cTaA Ayniie. MnTaABaiuenucbMO. XOTHOHO a^pecoBaHo AOTHO F.E.[3HHOBbeBy], HO Be^b 4eAO coBceM He AH*moe, nosTOMy no3BOAHio ce6e BbicKa3aTbCH.2 EoAee Bcero MCHH nopa3HAO CAOBO ,,6y3a". 9TO CAOBO ynoTpe6HA Ha nocAe^HeM IlAeHyMe Kaccaop no noBO4y Hauinx peMefl o pa3rpoMe KHTaftcKHx pa6o*iiix H 06 Hainett KanHTyAHi|HH nepe4 aHrAHftcKHM MeHbineBH3MOM.3 KTO B 3THX Bonpocax npaB: MW HAH CTaAHH? HAH TpeTbH no3HHHH? Pa3Be MO>KHO roBopHTb o ,,6y3e", He no AeHHHCKH, Ha 9TOT KopeHHoft Bonpoc?! ,,By3a" - BTO cKAOKa no HHiTO^cHOMy noBO4y HAH COBCCM 6e3 noBO4a.
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